Practicing law is stressful. Practicing medicine is stressful, too, but there is a difference, as illustrated in this example we often use in our CLE presentations: As a lawyer, you are like a brain surgeon. Imagine the patient is laid out on the table in front of you. It is your job to operate and […]
The emerging scientific field known as positive psychology helps us understand how the brain can change, and that we can purposefully change it to create more positive emotions. Positive emotions, in turn, broaden our cognitive capacity, allowing flexible, open-minded thinking for creative problem solving and building of personal resources such as skills, knowledge, and relationships. […]
Most of us decided to go to law school because we had a passion for justice and helping people. While we may not think of the legal profession as a traditional helping profession like we typically think of social work, the reality is that we serve in a primary helping capacity. Clients are in distress, […]
The legal profession has a problem. Lawyers are suffering and, far too often, they are taking their own lives. Lawyers, as a group, are 3.6 times more likely to suffer from depression than the average person. A John Hopkins study found that of 104 occupations, lawyers were the most likely to suffer depression. Further, according […]
Social scientists have researched and examined the relationship between material well-being and emotional well-being or happiness. For most of the world, greater levels of material wealth have led to greater levels of perceived emotional well-being—most everywhere, that is, but in the United States. (The Atlantic, January/February 2003). In the United States, the total numbers of […]
The legal profession is a helping profession. Most days lawyers find themselves trying to solve problems for their clients. We are paid to have answers and to fix situations that have gone awry. One of the difficulties for professionals who are supposed to have the answers for others is that it is difficult for them […]
One morning I went to a place beyond dawn. A source of sweetness that flows and is never less. I have been shown a beauty that would confuse both worlds, but I won’t cause that uproar. – ‘Rumi No matter how we grow up -wealthy or poor, well loved or forsaken – we form a view of life. […]
Every now and then the Lawyer Assistance Program gets a call from a law student at one of our seven North Carolina law schools. The student would rather talk without giving his or her name. The LAP person answering the phone says that’s OK and asks what the concerns are. Usually the student is facing […]
Close to ten years ago, the members of the Consortium for Professional Recovery Programs began discussing a collaborative project to survey North Carolina professionals. This consortium, comprised of representatives from medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy, psychology, nursing, and social work, met regularly to discuss methods to improve the behavioral health issues experienced by their professionals. The […]
In a recent column, I mentioned the results of Mary Howerton’s doctoral research. Mary is the former director of the Mecklenburg County Bar and a member of the Lawyer Assistance Program Board. Her doctoral research, concerning the quality of well-being of lawyers in North Carolina, revealed that over 27% of the lawyers in her study […]
Keith Yamashita is the hot item right now in advising corporations that have hit a brick wall. He is a 37-year-old principal in a business consulting firm on the West Coast known as Stone Yamashita Partners. His skill has been in identifying structural and systemic problems in a company or its leaders. His firm has […]
In our two previous columns we have shown that having the body’s response to stress continually turned on is like living in a mosquito infested swamp. Stress may not give you malaria, but having the stress-response turned on all the time can make the body vulnerable to a number of diseases. We reviewed how the […]